A View from Pawtucket: Two pioneers nurture an urban farm

The Garden of Life can be found behind a low-slung brick building, number 80-90, at Galego Court, a public housing development west of downtown.

Alex Kuffner Journal Staff Writer kuffneralex

PAWTUCKET — The Garden of Life can be found behind a low-slung brick building, number 80-90, at Galego Court, a public housing development west of downtown.

Here, beyond the guard shack at the entrance to the aging complex and up a small hill, on a 1-acre parcel that was once a playground but was more recently a weedy, fenced-off lot, Bleu Grijalva and Emily Jodka have built a farm, a joyous, chaotic jumble of fruits and vegetables and flowers and fungi.

There are rows of red Russian kale and rainbow Swiss chard, collard greens and okra, eggplants, tomatoes and bok choy. Sweet-smelling basil sprouts in clumps here and there, varieties like cinnamon, Thai, opal and Genovese. Sunflowers rise up like sentinels.

A field of blue Hopi corn covers one slope. A mushroom house, where delicate, milk-white oyster mushrooms sprout from hanging bags of pasteurized straw, stands in a corner.

And near the farm’s center are the greenhouses, a network of geodesic domes where red lettuces and giant parsley grow in a hydroponics system above a tank of water filled with tilapia, the plants feeding off nutrients in the waste water from 1,000 fish.

“We’re all about symbiosis,” says Grijalva, 44, who has a graying ponytail and wears a “got shallots?” T-shirt.

This struggling mill town is an unlikely home for a farm, but then that’s the point. Grijalva and Jodka are the cofounders of New Urban Farmers, a nonprofit that not only brings fresh produce to the inner city but aims to grow it there and teach people about it.

They are, as they describe themselves on their website, “social architects, planters of seeds, growers of food and minds.”

The pair met a few years ago when Jodka answered a Craigslist ad from Grijalva for someone to design a website for an earlier agricultural endeavor. She was fresh out of Johnson & Wales, having graduated in graphic and computer design, but she had always gardened.

“It was my favorite chore as a kid,” says Jodka, 28, in boots and a sleeveless work shirt. “Better than dishes. I liked the weeds.”

Grijalva had just finished working at Wishing Stone Farm in Little Compton after an itinerant life that had included work as a field hand at an olive farm in Greece and at vineyards in southern France and as a chef on Block Island and in restaurants in Providence.

“I had a natural interest in food,” he says.

They started with two community gardens in Pawtucket before the local housing authority found the parcel at Galego Court for them in the fall of 2009.

Since the first planting the following spring, the farm has quickly grown into a community hub. Residents tend raised beds. Artists and musicians host gatherings. Children come to play and attend after-school workshops on gardening and healthy eating.

“They get exposure to things that urban kids don’t get exposure to,” Jodka says. “Farms aren’t near where they live. They start to realize what’s possible and they see what food really is.”

She and Grijalva do more than just farm. Sometimes they and volunteers from the Wheeler School, Brown and Johnson & Wales spend afternoons helping kids from Galego Court with their homework. Once, Grijalva took a child to the town beach in Barrington. The boy kept licking his finger to taste the salt water. It was his first time at the beach.

Grijalva and Jodka are leasing additional farmland, in Seekonk and Warren, where they grow produce to sell at farmers’ markets and in a community-supported agriculture program, but the Garden of Life is their base and their pride.

During a tour last week, Jodka points out a spiky purple artichoke flower — it looks like something imagined by Dr. Seuss, she says — and the pair laugh about the washing machine that they use to rinse greens — an incongruous sight standing out in the open.

People stop by. Jose Luis comes from Galego Court to water his peppers, tomatoes and cilantro. A neighbor from a few streets over visits to boast about his fig harvest. An aspiring farmer comes to check out the hydroponics operation.

And up walks 6-year-old Joshua Gonzalez, who lives in the housing complex.

“He’s been coming by for years,” Jodka says.

“He just wants the tomatoes,” Grijalva says.

Joshua chats shyly with Grijalva and Jodka for a few minutes. She gives him some statices and zinnias to take home. He leaves with the flowers for his mother and, for himself, two perfectly ripe tomatoes.

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